Kits and Mortar

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about the games that cats like to play, and she mentioned that her cat is showing signs of learning to play fetch. Fetch is a game that is primarily associated with dogs as it’s a game that they are taught in puppyhood. But a quick search on YouTube shows that there are a lot of cats out there who spontaneously learn to play fetch without any training at all.

I’ve never tried to teach a cat to fetch, but I’d imagine that a key part of it is to have a toy that is both light enough for the cat to carry, and is easy for them to pick up in their mouths. Something small and fluffy, like a soft ball or toy mouse would work, but some cats can manage something a little more unwieldy. Like a stick:

The trick would be persuading the cat to pick the ball up and bring it back. The initial chase is a core part of cat behaviour – they’ll chase pretty much anything that moves if they’re in the right mood. Because it is a part of their hunting skill set, which is essential to survival in the wild, it will take very little encouragement to get a cat to pursue a fast moving, small object. It’s functionally just like going after a mouse.

But what about fetching? I suspect that’s related to mothering behaviour: Queens with kittens will capture live prey and bring it back to the nest in order to teach the kittens how to kill prey. Kittens raised by incompetent mothers who don’t do this, or can’t do this because they don’t know how to catch prey themselves, will be unable to kill any prey they capture when they grow up. They may even be unable to hunt successfully.

I would be interested to know if the gender split in cats that play fetch, and whether their mothers were competent hunters. Are male cats or cats with incompetent mothers less likely to play fetch? My friend’s cat is a tom, so clearly male cats can play fetch. A quick search of Google throws up many anecdotes of toms acting in a fatherly way towards their kittens, so I wonder if this type of behaviour is fundamental to both queens and toms, but just expressed more frequently in queens.

So both behaviours – chasing and fetching – are natural to cats. The trick would be inspiring these behaviours and then reinforcing them, which is easily done with clicker training. Once the cat is trained to understand the click, and then trained to target, i.e. to touch a specific item such as the end of a wand, then one can train the cat to pay attention to the ball. The chase is easy and probably doesn’t need much reinforcing. I’d then start reinforcing any motion of the cat’s mouth towards the toy, then any picking up action, then any motion back towards me, and so on.

The clicker technique is demonstrated in this video:

From a house design perspective, it doesn’t take much to make a space suitable for playing fetch. So long as there is enough room for the cat to get some speed up and no awkward nooks and crannies that might make retrieval of the toy difficult, one should be ok. Oddly, though, I can’t help thinking that this might be a great argument for a corridor!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under cats, design for cats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.